Good News In Bad Times: Finding Spiritual Meaning in the Midst of Uncertainty

By John P. Lozano

The current climate of political chaos, social and economic turmoil, and global polarization can leave us feeling deflated. In this uplifting book, popular spiritual author John Lozano helps us change our perspective and "look with new eyes" at God's active presence in our daily lives. 

Good News in Bad Times is a book about

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twenty-Third Publications/Bayard
• Release date: Jan 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781627855723

Book preview

Introduction

The Times We Live In

One thing we all have in common is our humanity, and we all experience in this humanity some profound good news as well as profound bad news. It is an extraordinary privilege to exist, and our existence comes with suffering. Anne Frank put it this way: Everyone has inside him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is.

Anne wrote these words surrounded by the very bad news of the Nazi occupation of her country while she was hiding from almost certain death if discovered. We can all speak of turmoil and pain in the daily struggles of living: the stress of job loss, financial ruin, life-threatening illness, and dissolution of friendships, marriages, and families are all examples. Our current climate of political chaos, turmoil, and polarization is tearing at the very fabric of our society and is profoundly disturbing. The divisive and caustic language used by political leaders has at times been bone chilling. As a result we are witnessing in our culture an increase in anxiety and depression that is epidemic. On top of all this we are currently in the midst of a world-wide pandemic. The cause is a virus that you cannot see, smell, or taste but is out there and you can get sick and even die. The lurking threat of job loss and financial ruin is currently palpable. This is a lot of bad news. One may wonder if there is any good news left to consider. The answer is Yes!

The good news is that God speaks in and through our humanity, and if we listen carefully to even the bad news in our lives we may discover it too can speak to us of a good news we may be missing.

This book is about listening to our human experience especially with the ears of faith and discovering practical strategies for responding to the good news and the bad news in our lives. It provides new ways to respond to our successes as well as our failures and to discover the extraordinary reality of divine presence in our lives that has the potential to change how we view everything.

Imagine you are holding a book that represents all the bad news in your life. If you place that book on your face all you see is the bad news. If, however, you move the book out in front of you at arms length, you still see the bad news, but now you also see so much more!

For the person of faith, the challenge, and the divine invitation, is this: Do you believe what you see or do you see what you believe? May the following words help you to see what you believe in all the circumstances of your life and discover a hope that does not disappoint.

Listening

Listen, so that you may live.

Isaiah 55:3

I am compulsive about one thing, at least one I will admit to publicly: directions. When I go on a trip, I really like to know where I am going and the best way to get there. Naturally, with the invention of GPS navigation systems, I thought it was a dream come true.

For someone like me, this system is great. It tells everything I need to know to get where I want to go. Best of all, it speaks to me with a lovely, sweet female voice.

Shortly after my purchase, I planned a hiking trip with a friend to the Pocono Mountains. Although I assumed I knew where I was going, I thought it would be fun to see how well the GPS worked and to get accustomed to it. A few minutes into my trip, that lovely, sweet female voice began to say, Wrong way, turn around. Wrong way, turn around.

My first thought was, I can’t believe it. She is wrong! Then I thought, I must be taking an alternative route, not the one she would choose. Eventually she will catch up with me, and she will reroute herself to my way of going.

That did not happen.

Wrong way, turn around. Wrong way, turn around.

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes…

By this time her voice was no longer sweet! Forty minutes later, I finally stopped my car only to discover that I was indeed going in the wrong direction. Once I had turned around and started heading in the right direction I had a moment of insight into myself: Why is it that I assumed I was going the right way?

A scary thought crossed my mind: How often do I assume I am going the right way when, in reality, I’m not…and I don’t know it?

In other words, we don’t know what we don’t know!

I assume that my current thinking is correct simply because it is my way of thinking, but I may be wrong, because I am not listening!

One of the most important skills we can develop in life is the ability to listen. Most human conflict is a breakdown of communication, and this breakdown often occurs when we do not hear or fully understand what another person means by their words or actions. We assume that our interpretation of what someone says is correct, but often it is not. Letting miscommunication continue over time creates a false understanding of the other person and a bias that becomes a lens through which we see them. Once this lens becomes hardened, we see everything the other person does and says through that lens.

It is not often that we say or hear someone else say, What I hear you saying is…. Am I correct? Yet so much miscommunication and conflict could be avoided with that simple question, which requires only a bit more effort to listen. Along with listening, humility is a key component in healthy communication. It requires humility not to assume my interpretations are always right. Listening with effort and humility creates the bedrock of good communication on which healthy relationships are built.

If the effort to listen and humility are necessary in human relationships, they are even more necessary in the arena of religious faith and the discovery of spiritual meaning. Perhaps miscommunications in our past have also created misunderstandings in our spiritual formation. Or perhaps we assume we are correct in our understanding, even though we may not be.

As in human relationships, miscommunication may go on for some time only to eventually form into a bias through which we see all religious belief and activity. I often hear someone say, Yeah, I’ve been to church, and my parents are Christian. I’ve heard it all before. I find myself thinking: Really? All of it?

Is there a new understanding possible in the area of faith and spirituality for us? If so, perhaps it could come through the same two qualities required for good communication between human beings: the work of listening and the disposition of humility. When it comes to finding a new understanding about faith, the work of listening is required to investigate with an open and patient mind and heart. Humility is required to truly listen to what the results of our investigations are saying and accept that our preconceived notions may be wrong.

This openness to new understanding of faith is what happened to me when I was driving back, in the right direction, to meet my friend. Along the way I had another insight. I began to think about how much technology and human intellectual power went into creating the GPS. All the work and skill of brilliant people, the sophisticated satellites out there in space, the millions of dollars invested—all to direct me and this little car of mine. Even though I realized this, I still thought I was right. I even paid money for the thing! If I had allowed myself the humility to think that I might not quite know how to get to my destination, and if I had expended the effort to listen to my GPS device and view my route on a map, I might have avoided getting lost.

Humanity often makes similar assumptions when it comes to the mystery of God and faith. If you are like me, you may recognize how often we believe that we already know all there is to know about the world and how it operates, even in spite of growing evidence that maybe we do not. We go around thinking, in subtle ways, that while we are so advanced in our knowledge, Christianity is lagging behind, a bit outdated, but it will eventually catch up.

How much has already been given us in our quest for God!

Billions of believers have trusted that God speaks through this book we call the Bible, giving us guidance on where to go and how to live, revealing something of the very nature of God. Along with this, billions of people in faith communities, some very holy and brilliant, have pondered, prayed, and struggled to help themselves and others know something of the mystery of God. All of this has already been given to us, given as a gift. We have been offered an incredible guidance system. That incredible guidance system is there for us. What if we could honestly admit that maybe, just maybe, we are wrong, or that we don’t know everything we need to know to live well and to know God? What if our worldview, our use of our time, talents, and money, the way we live our emotional lives, and how we look at God, ourselves, and other people might be just a little off? That we don’t know what we don’t know?

Unfortunately, we still think we know better and refuse to listen. We close our ears to God’s lovely, sweet, gentle voice—a voice that is soft, quiet, and almost imperceptible, because God respects our freedom to choose to listen or not. God always gives us a choice.

Often we run from the work of listening and prefer to go along with easy, pat answers. It was meant to be. It must have been God’s will.

I remember a time when I regularly met with someone for guidance and support for my journey of faith and prayer. After I would tell him everything going on with me, he would always say the same thing: So what is God saying to you in all this? Initially my reaction was irritation and I would say to myself, I don’t know, that is why I am coming to you; you tell me! He would never let me off the hook, however, from the task of listening. He knew it is only